In recent years, some commercial aircraft have been designed with relatively large wingspans to increase fuel efficiency and/or increase carrying capacity. However some airports are not able to accommodate these larger wingspans. Accordingly, some of these aircraft have implemented folding wing tips to reduce an effective wing span to enable movement through these airports while still retaining fuel-efficiency advantages associated with the relatively large wing spans.
A typical folding wing tip system has an actuation system to fold and extend a wing tip. Because the degree to which the folding wing tip is rotated relative to a neutral angle (e.g., a rotated angle of 0 degrees relative to a wing centerline reference) can significantly impact the latching, locking, and aerodynamic performance during flight, coordinating and/or controlling the actuation system to rotate the wing tip accurately can be important. However, backlash and/or biases of the wing tip or an associated actuation system (e.g., a drive system) can result in inaccurate position control or centering of the wing tip, thereby resulting in reduced latching, locking mechanism malfunction and/or an increased drag coefficient.
Some known wing tip centering or position calibration techniques involve manual adjustment and/or alignment based on operator judgment (e.g., manual visual adjustment). Some other known techniques involve a fixture, such an index plate to align the wing tip. However, these known centering and/or positioning techniques may result in inaccuracies, may be time consuming and/or cannot adjust to backlash internal to the actuation or drive system